Reiser 4

[BobGuy]

For newbies: Reiser4 can speed up your computer enough that you can buy a cheap hard drive, and still go fast.

Both of these advances are the result of research breakthroughs that had the pleasant side effect of making not just these important special cases fast, but the whole filesystem faster than anything else out there.

Yet speed isn't all you get. Reiser4 can do more, and keep your data more secure. If you read the rest of this website we'll explain why features like encryption and inheritance are useful, and we'll do it using graphics and phrases designed to make the abstract concepts stick to the brain. :D

The Reiser 4 filesystem, stability estimated to occur by June 2003. http://namesys.com/v4/v4.html

[Gand]

Excellent. I lost 2 drives of 30 GB each due to FAT32 being, well, crap. So I am waiting till the newest and the fastest is out so I can migrate most of my machine to Linux.

[Case]

Waaa! I wanna be Tron, and live inside my computer. I like the babe with the cleaver, the way her legs grip the data stream :lol:

Seriously, thanks for the link BG. I've printed it out to read it. Looks quite interesting and provocative so far . . . .

Sponsorship by DARPA doesn't hurt either . . .

[TJM4FUN]

Well, I'm far from an expert, but the reiser file system is already a very durable and safe file system. Speed boosts definately are an added plus.

It is the default file system for Suse linux, and during my experiments in the install I quite often just powered the system off without shutting down, and never had a problem.
My co-worker who has used linux for years told me that the normal linux file systems don;t handle that very well, and he has seen it cause full reloads from improper shutdowns.

I believe his exact words were, if this were xxx distro and you did that, you would most likely have to reinstall everything again.

[Grogan]

No filesystems handle an abrupt shutdown during a disk write very well... ext2 looks scary when that happens and you have to run fsck, but if you handle the situation correctly the filesystem is usually fully recoverable. Reiser isn't even full journaling, it's only meta data. The idea of journaling is to replay the journal to return the filesystem to that state before the bad writes occurred. The files that were being written will be either not there, or incomplete. Journaling is highly overrated.

NTFS is a full journaling filesystem and it's supposed to be resistant to corruption due to incomplete writes... but how many times have we seen NTFS filesystems blow up in our faces? I've probably seen more NTFS filesystems get irrepairably hosed than FAT32. (scandisk usually can repair the damage where I've seen chkdsk "finish the job")

There are good reasons to stick with time tested stable filesystems like ext2. The first of which is, the specification doesn't change. It's unlikely to get broken in new kernel releases and any old kernel can access and more importantly repair it. This means, when your filesystem appears fucked and you can't mount it you can boot with that old trusty rescue disk that you know and love and fix your filesystem.

Coincidently, I just recovered from a serious mess. If I'd have been using reiser or some other filesystem I might have been fucked.

1) A bad animated gif caused my Opera browser to lock the system. (Fuck Opera forever! Though it hasn't happened in a long time, that's the last time it's doing that to me)

2) A new (pre release) kernel I built last night, gave me a nasty surprise in that it was out of sync with the filesystem repair utilities (need to be recompiled against new kernel headers most likely). Fsck didn't work correctly and my root filesystem was unmountable after that. (and my /home partition had serious errors).

All I had to do was boot with my favourite rescue disk Tom's Root Boot (http://www.toms.net/rb/) and run e2fsck on the unmounted filesystems with switches to repair them. (I checked for bad blocks while I was at it also... there were none)

My filesystems were all fine after that, and I built a new stable kernel and all is right in Grogan land once again and the ext2fs utilities work correctly. I'm glad I was using a mature filesystem or I might have been redoing Linux today. (who is to say... it's also possible that it might not have happened in the first place with a different filesystem but I'll put my money on continuing to use ext2)

[BobGuy]

Thanks for the tip off Grogan about the pre3 kernel patch, I'm going to hold off for a week or so and see if others report having this problem. If I see pre4 out in a day or two, that would be a good clue. :D

I used the reiserfs in my mandrake 7.2 distro, and it never gave me any problems, although I never built a kernel using that distro. The best part is that the fsck was never necessary, although reiser does have a fsck.reiserfs utility. Exactly how well it works I can't say as I never had to use it to recover from a disaster.

One of the great things about open source is that choice is looked upon favorably. Linux is the only operating system with four journaling file systems in production: ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, and XFS.